They sucked me back in.

Seeing the trailers for the expansion filled me with nostalgia.  So I went ahead and bought a game care and preordered the x-pac. Rolled up an Monk on Hyjal and created a level 90 Shaman.  I'm only going to play casually. I don't have the time or desire to be a hardcore raider anymore.  But playing casually with some old friends from my raiding days ?  Yeah. I've got time for that. :) So after nearly 4 years. I'm back playing WoW.

Hard Modes

Heroic Halfus down to FnB last Thursday. We spent about 90 minutes or So Wednesday wiping to him, Thursday we got him on our 4th pull, so not to bad.  Last night we started working on Heroic Chimaeron. Had a 2% wipe on our next to last pull of the night. So close. We will get him next week for sure.  We missed server first Heroic boss by a day.  One of the 10 man raids got Halfus the night before. I don't really like how there is no distinction between the two sizes anymore. Say what you want about the difficulty of the mechanics being equal, finding and organizing 25 people is 5 times as difficult as 10.

No 4.0.6 yet..

...according to mmo champion at least.

So work has implemented a new web blocking protocol, which stops pretty  much all game related sites. I can still post to this blog, but most of the sites I pull info from are not available.

So this will just be a quick update post.

< Fire and Blood > downed Nefarian on 25 Sunday night. Now onto Hard Modes.
FnB passed our 3rd anniversary on the 21st of January. We've come a long way from 5 friends who played on an EU server and did a weekly Kara run. Now we are top guild on Quel'dorei, and ranked in the top 3-400 US. Yeah we are by no means world beaters, but for the relatively casual attitude we have, I'm very proud of how well we have done.

One hand giveth, the other taketh away.

The latest PTR build had a lot of changes. The shaman changes are very interesting.

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

•Flametongue Weapon procs now deal roughly 20% less damage.
•The Windfury Weapon proc can now trigger 3 additional attacks, up from 2.

Elemental
•Lava Burst's damage has been increased by roughly 10%.

Restoration
•Earth Shield can no longer be dispelled.
•Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman's Spirit, exclusive of short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped. In addition, its effects are now raid-wide.

Glyphs
•Glyph of Hex now reduces the cooldown by 10 seconds, down from 15.

Intial testing was showing that even with the first change of making Flametongue scale from AGI rather than Spellpower that caster MH's were still simming as best in slot.  Reducing the damage by 20% certainly should put that to rest. Increasing WF to give 3 attacks is supposed to make up for that nerf.  I am wondering if this could bring dual WF back into the picture?  We'll see what the testers come back with today.

Raid went well last night. We used the Quick DKP add-on for the first time to award loot. ( I ran it last week to award dkp ) It seemed to work pretty well. We got 5/6 in BWD and through the first two bosses in BoT.  Tonight will be finishing off BoT and then on to ToW and working on Al'akir after killing conclave.

BWD trash dropped Maimgor's Bitewhich was a pretty nice upgrade for me. I also picked up normal Essence of the Cyclone

Turns out Shaman are getting some changes in the next patch.

To the Ground!

So last week we got this message about planned shaman changes.

Shaman

Just a few additions of Glyph in spell tooltips to properly reflect their effects when you use them. Nothing new.

Then yesterday they break the incoming nerfs in a warlock thread.

That was just a nerf to cleansing waters. since Shaman are doing so awesome right now  they figured they should take a whack at our utility. :/

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

•Chain Heal’s effectiveness has been increased by approximately 10%.
•Hex now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
•Purge now dispels a single effect instead of two.
•Tremor Totem has been redesigned. The totem is now usable under Fear, Charm, or Sleep effects, and pulses much more rapidly, but lasts 6 seconds and has a 1-minute cooldown.

Elemental Combat
•Earthquake damage has been increased by approximately 10%.

Enhancement
•Flametongue Weapon damage now scales from attack power instead of spell power (for Enhancement shaman only).
•Purge no longer has its mana cost reduced by Mental Quickness.

Restoration
•Cleansing Waters no longer fires its heal effect twice when a shaman removes a Magic and a Curse debuff with a single cast.
•Deep Healing (Mastery) has been increased to 3% per point, up from 2.5%.
•Greater Healing Wave mana cost has been increased by 10%; healing done has been increased by 20%.
•Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman’s Spirit, exclusive to short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped.

Actually there are some buffs in there. No one cares about Elemental but i suppose the extra EQ damage is nice for them.

Better Chain Heal is good. Deep Healing was terrible, so a buff there is good. I'll take a better GHW, especially a instant mana free MW proc one.

The purge nerf is BS. Once again PvP hoses PvE. If you can make the Hex change PvP only why not the purge change? 

I'm of two minds on Tremor totem. 6 second duration is horrible especially on a 1 minute CD.  Make fears castable only once a minute then it will be ok. However being able to use it while cc'd is nice for the times when you don't realize that the aoe fear is coming or miss time dropping it. Still the CD should be 30 seconds max.

The change I'm most happy about it  the Flametounge change. As long as they get the numbers right and its not hitting for any less.  I mean my damage is mediocre enough the way it is right now. But I don't want to be running dual flame tongue with a caster MH. Firstly because I don't want to be taking caster weapons from casters, but secondly it just feels so wrong, despite what Elam says. :p

One Month In, AKA: the pain of crafting.

So Cata has been out a month. Patch 4.06 is on the PTR. There have been waves and waves of hot fixes.
What do you people think of the expansion so far?

I'm fairly happy with it. The biggest issue for me right now is what a pain in the ass it is to level Leatherworking. Its crazy expensive, material intensive.

The material breakdown is Savage Leather Scraps < Savage Leather < Heavy Savage Leather, with it taking 5 of the smaller to make the larger.  Heavy cannot be skinned from anything so it take 5 mobs skinned to get one.  The last pattern that uses regularr savage turns green at  490, so your last 35 points all take Heavy.

A few mobs outside of instances will occasionally drop 2, but most skins give a single Savage. So on average lets say it take 5 creatures skinned to get one,  From 500-525 it take a minimum of 8 Heavy Savage to make anything orange, at 510 its 10. Plus any patterns that will skill you up from 510-525 cost 10 Heavy Savage as well. The current price for HSL on the AH is 200g. so that's 2000g for a nominally useful pvp pattern. Each piece takes 10 HSL and 10 volatile to craft. So that's about 2400g to craft. plus they stay orange for only 5 points. Amoritazing the cost of the patterns over those 5 points and that's about 3k per items which will give you 2 skill ups, so 1.5k per point. You can possible sell them for a few hundred gold if lucky, so make that 1400g per point x15 or 21k to go from 510-525.

Lets compare that to Alchemy which I maxxed out on my lv 78 warlock. You can get to 500 making potions and elixirs which take 2 herbs and a vial. Herbs cost about 10g ea, or if you have an herbalist each node, which doesn't need to be killed, yields on average 3 herbs with volatile life thrown in to boot. Now above 500 you will need to make flasks, which take 30 herbs and life so that's 300 g per flask, but as opposed to the LW items flasks you can sell for a profit! At 505 you can start learning transmutes, Where you can take 3 green gems plus 3 herbs, and make another useful item, a blue gem! granted at current prices, this might be a slight loss of 50g  or so, but still better than 1400. lets say you go from 505 to 525 on transmutes.  At a net cost of 50g per point that gasp! 1000g!  20k less than LW, and unlike leather workers alchemists are always in demand for flasks and potions, and  they have transmutes which will always turn a profit as well.

Jewelcrafting is somewhere in between. I haven't maxed it out on my DK yet, but there is not really a reason to. The 525 patterns are not as good as rep items in most cases. 500 is all you need to make your JC chimaera's eyes. The only road block on JC is doing the dailies to get the patterns/eyes. That and the high cost of the common gems used for the dailies.  But ore is plentiful and not that expensive.

I haven't tried Blacksmithing, Engineering, or Tailoring , in cata yet, so I don't know where they rank.  Enchanting was somewhere in below LW as skill ups were only costing me around 400g ea with the scrolls selling for about 25g ea  and a net cost of 375 per point.

Cataclysm thoughts.

So Wrath has ended and Cataclysm has come. Guilds are already claiming world firsts on Heroic Modes. FnB is 7/12 for T11 normal so far which puts us 6 bosses ahead of the next most progressed guild on QD.

Baelor is dressed in an ugly ass set of Blues, and he misses his Sanctified Frost Witch's gear terribly. All my non set epics have been Disenchanted,  My trade skills still need leveling,and I've a dozen new  raid fights to learn, not to mention half a dozen reps to grind up. And that's just on my main!. I've got to level my hunter to herb and skin, and the DK has mining and JC to worry about. plus in never for my 'Lock to 80 even, and he's my Scribe and Alchemist.

To top that off every time I see my nameplate its says Baelor < Recruit of Fire and Blood >.  Now ain't that a kick in the pants? I've been GM of this guild since starting it almost 3 years ago. Taken it from a bunch of casual rerolls into the top guild on server, and I'm an Mother F'ing recruit. Screw you Guild Rep!

Well that's the bad.

The good?  The new zones are fantastic. Aside from going overboard on cutscenes leveling was easy and a logical progression. The new raid bosses are all interesting so far. Leaping from boss to boss on Conclave of Winds is a hoot. Once the early grinding is done, and I can get back to my more sedate pace of outside raid play I think I'll be much happier.

Epic Head

We didn't have the ideal group for Heroic RS last night, so we just killed it normal and did a chieve run in Uldaur and got a number of people their Ironbounds. Which is nice as its just about the coolest mount in the game IMO.  Except for Mimiron's head.  That's cooler.

My raid leader ninja'd master looter from me while we were on a break before Yogg 0, so when it came time to distribute the spoils I was out voted by the officers, and they gave it to me. Sometimes its good to be GL.


Also there is an update to the ptr.

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Enhancement
•Windfury Weapon now deals 125% weapon damage when Unleash Elements is used, up from 40%.

A very nice buff, to what had been looking like an underwhelming ability.

According to Rouncer over on EJ its also increased the haste buff to our next 6 from 20% to 40% which then become 60% with 2/2 elemental weapons.
All together that should be a nice 4-5% dps gain if I'm not mistaken.

Beta Changes.

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Elemental
•Elemental Reach now also increases the range of Searing Totem by 7/15 yards.

Enhancement
•Windfury Weapon now deals 40% of weapon damage when Unleash Elements is used, up from 20%.

Doubling the direct damge portion of UE-WF is a decent change. From what I've been hearing the dd portion of that is next to nothing right now.  The longer searing range is nice for Elementals.  Wish they'd made it baseline though.


Fire and Blood did an achievement run last night. We'd had several people who were missing out on some of the chieves for their frostwyrms. It all went pretty smoothly, aside from Sindragosa.  Frost tomb placement got a bit dicey, and we ened up having a tank get a 6th stack when the boss was at 1%. Dots took him down, so looks like we get to do that wonderful all you can eat again next week.

I had a pretty good Saurfang parse pulled 17.4 k
Of course that was with a rogue tricksing me, since there were no other rogues for him to trade with last night.

http://www.stratfu.com/kamigami/comparebot/4cd2aec88ead0ef026000000#damage

Not sure where I gained all the dps from last week. Tricks is maybe 500 dps at best.  looks like I had quite a few more Lightning Bolts.  and a bit better percentage of Lava Lash crits. I had more than 50% more WF hits as well.  Looks like RNG was good to me this week, or bad to me last.

Really GC?

So Enhancemnt finnaly got a reply in a thread.
Of course it wasnt the mostly well thought out and discussed 20 concern thread, it was in the thread where some guy need to say he was happy with the class because of indoor Ghost Wolf....

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE indoor Ghost Wolf. Its the cat's pajamas. But why does that thread get the attention. Look I'm sure that the other threads get read as well, but once again it seems that Blizzards data is not the same that the Shaman community seems to see.

We are seeing Enhancement at about the same dps they were at before at level 80, and are competitive with e.g. Fury warriors, Ret paladins and Unholy DKs at 85 as far as PvE dps goes. As always, it depends a lot on the encounter and the individual behind the keyboard.


If you find that is not the case for you, let us know, but it would be helpful to provide something more than anecdotal information.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

So I'm not on the beta, I dont know what things are like at 85, but at 80 my dps is lower on static fights, while its a bit better on dynamic fights. On average it may be about the same, but on the benchmark fights where I used to be top 5, I'm now bottom 5.  As shown with my post yesterday with the worlds best players we are behind every other hybrid dpser. Now I know someone has to be last, but it seems like its us far to often.

My Saurfang Parse form last night was better than last week. I climbed up to 13th on the meters and my dps was  up to 15.4k  Thats still 1k  under what I was pulling pre patch, and thats with replacing 264 Tiny Abomb with the 271 Sharpend Twilight Scale.

Enhancement DPS

So I found a parse on WoL rankings for Enhancement Shaman  that was post 4.0.1
http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/Deathbringer_Saurfang/25H/Enhancement_Shaman/
The guy pulled 18.4k dps on Saurfang.  Which is very impressivve.  Its still well below the top parse pre patch.

The really sad part?
He was 17th in damage in the fight for the raid. So the #14 Enhance parse in the world finished  behind every other dpser in his raid, aside from an anomoly of a boomkin.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/pkunzzts7gps8fl9/sum/damageDone/?s=1574&e=1678#Leedsz

And this is our BEST fight.

Its a bit discouraging with other classes pulling up to 33k.
Ok so that's Mages

But lets look at the other  melee hybrids tops dps scores since 4.0.1
Feral 23.5k
Ret 22.6
Fury 26.9
Arms 18.5
Frost DK 21.9
Unholy 26.2

Now who else did the patch screw up.
Well combat got borked. I had to scan down until the 183rd ranked parse to find a post patch ranking
still it was 19.4k which is 1000dps better than the best Enhance parse.

There is a 20 plus page thread of concens on the forums.
No response from Blizzard to this point.

There is a new beta build out there.  lots of adjustments,  the only one for Shamans was increasing the cost of Chain Heal.  Hopefully our issues get addressed at some point.

Where did my DPS go?

My combat log got messed up last Wednesday on farm night, so I had to wait until last night to compare how I was doing pre and post patch.

I'll use Saurfang as a comparison.

10/6 raid   #2 on the meters @ 16046 dps
10/20 raid  #16 on the meters @ 14663 dps
a 1400 dps drop and 14 slots on the meters. Ouch that hurts.

Now some of it might be the use of fire totems. I haven't been using fire elemental since the patch.  Purely on the totems dps it looks like the fire elemental did 1750 dps and the searing did 1242 dps, so thats 500 there. No Fire Nova is another 603 dps. however that's in a vacuum.  There is also the loss of searing flames to consider, if I used the fire elemental. Searing Flames did 337 dps, in addition to that there is the Improved Lava Lash buff to consider. Lava lash is out hardest hitting ability now and a 5 stack of searing flames buffs that by 100%. Next week I'll try it with the elemental and compare.

But the thing that stick out the most to me is the loss of white damage.
4825dps vs. 2598dps
That's a 46% loss there.
Windfury dropped from  1893dps tp 1135dps

Somethings up with manifest anger as well. MH hits went from 201dps to 70dps
Spell damage stayed about the same.

Lava Lash as I mentioned shot through the roof, from  505dps to 2362dps, a whooping  467% increase.

I think a lot of this drop off is due to several things. First we had  only 1 rogue on 10/6 so I got his ToT's. However I had even better dps the week before pulling 16273 w/o ToT's. I think a big things is the further consolidation of raid buffs. Kings down to 5% and merged with Mark of the Wild, loss of the hit buffs, lowering of the haste buff, loss of improved SOE. As hybrids we lose on both the melee and spellpower nerfs.  I had to add hit, and mastery to keep my magical damage on about the same level,  I lost a ton of haste regemming and from the relic slot change, and the WF nerf. Plus they nerfed the amount of haste gained per point of rating as well.

Strat fu link to compare the parses.

Are you ready for 4.01?



So 4.01 is supposed to drop tomorrow, which means a lot of big changes for Enhancement.

New Talent tree, Changes to Stats, Reforging, New Glyphs, New rotations, its a lot.

These changes are balance around level 85, not 80, but we still have 8 weeks until Cataclysm come out, so that's 2 months of dealing with the changes on current content.

Talents and Glyphs

Lets start with spec. I'm leaning towards this 5/31/0 build for level 80. Its skipping Improved Shields in favor of Totemic Reach. Working on Heroic LK I think a larger radius is worth it.

For glyphs some more testing might be needed but Feral Spirits and Lava Lash seem to be the top 2. With the change to Stormstrike that glyph is probably not a top 3 glyph. I'll go with Windfury at least until More data is available.

Stats

The other thing we will all need to do is Reforge and Re-gem.

Agility is going to be our king stat. It provides AP, Spellpower through Mental Quickness, and Crit. We still want to cap spell hit and expertise, but not at the expense of Agi.  Since you can't reforge into Agi, you want to try and cap Hit/Exp through reforging.

If a gear has no hit, reforge haste or crit to hit. If it has hit reforge haste or crit to expertise.

If it has hit + mastery reforge mastery to exp.

If it has exp + mastery reforge mastery to hit.

Now our caps are changing as well. 

The 3% raid buff from a Shadow Priest or Boomkin are going away. So out new spell hit cap is 446 hit rating.

Unleashed rage is only providing  8 expertise rather than 9 and the Orc Racial for Axe/Fist is down to 3 expertise from 5. So we will need more expertise on our gear to reach 26. So 149 for non-orcs and 123 for orcs with axe/fist weapons.

For gemming  Gem Agi unless there is a very good socket bonus

Use Agi/Mastery gems for Yellow sockets

Use Agi/Hit for Blue sockets.

Rotation

I need to do some better testing with rotation as well, but since Fire Nova no longer works with Searing Totem, its out of our single target rotation. I'm also not sure where Fire elemental will come in in relation to Searing totem yet. But it looks like out single target rotation will be close to something like this.

Drop totems first

MW5-LB

SW

ST-0

LL

SS-0

FS-0

ES

SR (2pc T10)

SS

ST

Once Rawr and Enhsim are fully updated this might change, but early testing seems to indicate that our priority queue is a bit more forgiving than it used to be.

Things should be interesting.

Level 85 ratings

From EJ

Level 85 caps

Melee Hit : 120.109 which means with base 6% from dual wielding we need 241 hit to cap our specials.
Expertise : 30.0272 which means with 2/2 Unleashed Rage we need 541 expertise to cap.
Spell Hit : 102.446 which means we need 1742 hit to cap for raid bosses (at 17%)

That is a buttload of Hit.  542 Expertise is a hefty number as well.  Perhaps we will need to spend on the spell hit Talent.

Lions? We don't need no stinking Lions!

Not when we have Kron'Kar Annihilators.
Badass Armoured Giant Scorpions >>> Lion with a Tabard.

I can't wait to get one.

now with extra mana savings

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Enhancement

• Mental Quickness now reduces the mana cost of your instant spells by 75% instead of reducing the cost of shock spells by 60%.

Looks like its going to be hard to run out of mana using our normal rotation. Throwing our heals sure, but shocks and WM lightning and totems? should be fine.

Ow! That hurts!

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Elemental
•Stoneclaw Totem now has 6186 health, up from 797. Shields your totems for up to 4143 damage, up from 664.
•Earth Shock now also reduces ranged attack speed.

Enhancement
•Dual Wield now also allows you to parry frontal melee attacks.
•Windfury Totem now increases the melee and ranged attack speed of all party and raid members within 40 yards by 10%. (Down from 20%)
•Feral Spirit now lasts 30 sec, down from 45 sec. Cooldown changed to 2 min, down from 3 min.

Restoration
•Mana Tide Totem now has a 3 min cooldown, down from 5 min.

So I saw GC comment about how valuable WF/Imp Icy Talons buff was and so I figured this was coming but a 50% nerf really hurts.

I'm guessing the the change to DW is just giving us back the old spirit weapons parry buff minus the threat reduction?

The Feral Spirit change is actually pretty nice. Allows Wolves to line up better with any 2min trinket CD's, while still maintaining a 25% uptime.


There was also this update earlier in the week.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


Enhancement
•Windfury Weapon now deals damage equal to two extra attacks with 4430 extra attack power. (Up from 1395 Attack Power)
•Flametongue Weapon now increases total spell damage by 750, up from 235.
•Primal Wisdom (Talent) is gone.
•Primal Wisdom (Passive) *New* - Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to immediately restore 5% of your base mana.
•Unleashed Rage is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Now increases Expertise by 4/8 (up from 3/6/9), increases all party and raid members' attack power by 5/10% (up from 4/7/10%)

Restoration
•Earthliving Weapon now increases healing done by 531, up from 167.
•Healing Wave base healing value reduced by 25%. Mana cost changed to 9% of base mana, up from 6% of base mana.
•Mana Tide Totem no longer restores mana, now increases the spirit of party members within 40 yards by 200%.

Which is them updating the scaling of imbues for level 85 and reiterating the freeing up of those 3 talent points. We do end up losing 1 expertise, which while not huge is still a loss especially considering how much rating you need per point at 85. That along with degrading hit rating at higher tiers, all adds up.

Well now this takes a bit of the sting out.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Enhancement Changes
In our current Cataclysm build, we have cut the Primal Wisdom talent (and give it as part of the Enhancement passive) and reduced Unleashed Rage from 3 to 2 ranks, but with the same overall effect. That should take care of the extra talent points that the tree seemed to have.

We are still working on making the Searing Totem a little smarter. (Source)

So there are 3 points that I've desperately been looking for. This will allow us to pick up utility talents like ancestral swiftness or totemic reach, along with all the dps talents.

Without know  for sure what things are going to look like I'm leaning towards a build like this.
http://www.wowtal.com/#k=ZbWQdJ_sN.9zi.shaman

This is welcome news after being taken behind the woodshed over the weekend.
I'm still pissed they are giving Bloodlust to Mages, but giving it to Hunters?

Bloodlust / Heroism

•Ancient Hysteria (Core Hound - E) - Increases melee, ranged, and spell casting speed by 30% for all party and raid members. Lasts 40 sec.
Allies receiving this effect will become Sated and be unable to benefit from Bloodlust or Time Warp again for 10 min. / Instant, 6 min cooldown

That's just mean! They might as well kick us in the nads while they are at it.  That was after the latest build changes.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Elemental
•Stoneclaw Totem deal and absorb effect reduced by 50%.
•Chain Lightning now has a 3 sec cooldown, down from 6 sec.
•Earthquake base damage increased by 55%. Now has a 10% chance to knock down the targets (down from 20%). Lasts 8 sec, down from 10 sec. Mana cost changed to 60% of base mana, down from 86% of base mana. Cooldown removed.
•Storm, Earth and Fire renamed to Earth's Grasp - Grants your Earthbind Totem a 50/100% chance to root nearby targets for 5 sec when cast.
•Lava Flows now also increases the the periodic damage of your Flame Shock by 20/40/60%
•Totemic Wrath is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4.
•Elemental Precision now increases damage instead of your chance to hit.

Enhancement
•Stormstrike now increases your chance to critical strike the enemy with Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lightning Shield and Earth Shock spells by 25% for 15 sec instead of increasing nature damage by 20% on the target.
•Windfury Weapon - Unleash Weapon now lasts 6 swings or until 12 sec, instead of a flat 12 sec.
•Ghost Wolf speed reduced from 40% to 30%.
•Maelstrom Weapon no longer affects Lava Burst.

Restoration
•Cleansing Waters base healing increased from [ 1916 to 2075 ] to [ 2634 to 2970 ]
•Tidal Waves no longer affects Lesser Healing Wave. Now affects Healing Surge.
•Telluric Currents is now a Tier 5 talent, down from Tier 6.
•Improved Cleanse Spirit is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 5.
•Nature's Blessing is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 5.
•Improved Chain Heal is gone.
•Restorative Totems renamed to Soothing Rains - Increases the amount healed by your Healing Stream Totem by 25%, and your Healing Rain spell by 15/30%.
•Blessing of the Eternals is now a Tier 6 talent, up from Tier 4. No longer increases the critical chance of your spells.
•Nature's Guardian is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 4.
•Ancestral Awakening is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 3.
•Improved Water Shield no longer affects Lesser Healing Wave. Now affects Healing Surge.

I'm not sure about the Stormstrike change. It looks like a dps nerf. 25% chance for an extra 50% damage  vs. a flat 20% boost. But because of the change to Maelstrom Weapon we may be needed that bonus crit to keep Elemental Devastation up.

Unleash WF is a flat out nerf. Unless we are moving we will normally have a lot more than 6 MH attacks in 12 seconds.

Poor Ghost Wolf. Not a huge nerf, but 10% is 10%

And of course they are once again taking Lava Burst off of Maelstrom Weapon. There goes our auto crits. There goes our near 100% uptime of Elemental Devastation. There goes our instant burst damage. They did this to us in Wrath so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they did it again. Just one more thing I was really looking forward to being removed, like Path of the Titans and guild talents.

On top of that the the stoneclaw shield is being cut in half.  The only positive is the cooldown on Chain Lightning is being reduced to 3 seconds, so on multi target fights we should be able to use it for every MW proc.

Glyphs!

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


•Chain Heal - Increases healing done by your Chain Heal spell to targets beyond the first by 15%, but decreases the amount received by the initial target by 10%. (Your Chain Heal heals 1 additional target.)
•Earthliving Weapon - Increases the effectiveness of your Earthliving weapon's periodic healing by 20%. (Increases the chance for your Earthliving weapon to trigger by 5%.)
•Elemental Mastery - While your Elemental Mastery ability is active, you take 20% less damage from all sources. (Reduces the cooldown of your Elemental Mastery ability by 30 sec.)
•Fire Nova - Increases the radius of your Fire Nova spell by 5 yards. (Reduces the cooldown of your Fire Nova spell by 3 seconds.)
•Ghost Wolf - Your Ghost Wolf form grants an additional 10% movement speed.
•Healing Stream Totem - Your Healing Stream Totem also increases the Fire, Frost, and Nature resistance of party and raid members within 30 yards by 150. (Your Healing Stream Totem heals for an additional 20%.)
•Hex - Reduces the cooldown of your Hex spell by 15 sec. (Increases the damage your Hex target can take before the Hex effect is removed by 20%.)
•Lava Burst - Your Lava Burst spell deals 10% more damage. (Your Lava Burst spell gains an additional 10% of your spellpower.)
•Totemic Recall *New* - Causes your Totemic Recall ability to return an additional 50% of the mana cost of any recalled totems.
•Lightning Shield - Your Lightning Shield can no longer drop below 3 charges from dealing damage to attackers.
•Grounding Totem *New* - When your Grounding Totem absorbs a spell, it attempts to reflect that spell on its caster, but the cooldown of your Grounding Totem is increased by 45 sec.
•Arctic Wolf *New* - Alters the appearance of your Ghost Wolf transformation, causing it to resemble an arctic wolf.
•Shamanistic Rage *New* - Activating your Shamanistic Rage ability also cleanses you of all dispellable Magic debuffs.
•Water Shield - Increases the passive mana regeneration of your Water Shield spell by 50%. (Up from 30%)

Well I'm not seeing anything that makes me think I'll be switching any of my major glyphs.  There does appear to be some healing nerfs with chain heal and healing stream. Earthliving seems to be a boost, and the resistances from Healing stream look to be ok.

Well 10% to lava burst is very nice on 2nd glance. With LvB being on Maelstrom Weapon we will be using it on CD as much as we can to keep elemental devastation up.

There is a lot of situational use here though, and with the swapability of glyphs I can certainly see  using Hex when you need CC, SR on certain fights, and Fire Nova for big add fights.

New Beta build

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


Elemental
•Magma Totem base damage increased by 33%.
•Fire Nova base damage increased by 33%.
•Rolling Thunder is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 4. Mana regeneration increased from 1% to 2%.
•Improved Fire Nova moved to Enhancement.
•Elemental Reach no longer increases the range of Thunderstorm, now affects the range of all your Shock spells. (Old - Just Flame Shock)

Enhancement
•Unleash Elements now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
•Totemic Vigor is gone.
•Improved Fire Nova is now a Tier 4 Enhancement Talent - Increases the damage done by your Fire Nova by 10/20% and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 sec.

Restoration
•Improved Water Shield now also procs from Greater Healing Wave.

The increased range on UE will be nice for openers I guess. Otherwise its mainly for Elementals.
Losing Totemic Vigor means nothing for PvE as you would never take it.  The imp FN change is a bit odd. It seemed like they were stearing us away from using it in our rotation, and now not only is it in Enhance, its in Deep Enhance.

I just dont know where the points will come from to take it. Taking all the dps talents without Imp FN takes 41 points. Thats also skipping Ancestral Swiftness and Totemic Reach.  Ideally I'd like all of those, but where can I find 6 points?  Possibly take 3 out of imp shields. Maybe lose one from Acuity.  Thats 4.  I guess its going to take a lot of testing to see whats worth losing and what isn't.